Happily, however, once eighteen-year-old Alfie finally arrived and began tidying potting sheds, mending tools and making Jennings cups of tea like a whirling dervish, the old man relented. Sitting out on the terrace at the back of the house, overlooking the lawn and rolling acres of parkland beyond, Angela watched happily as man and boy tended the flowerbeds, Alfie pruning and Jennings given directions, waving his spindly old arms about like a general on a battlefield.
Noticing that her own arms were turning pink and freckly, despite the lashings of factor fifty sun block she’d applied only an hour ago, Angela retreated indoors. It was half past two on a Friday afternoon, almost time to collect Logan from school. Logan, thank God, seemed to have settled in brilliantly both at school and in the village. Sweetly, she’d developed a thumpingly enormous crush on Gabe Baxter, the local farmer to whom Brett had just sold some fields. Angela suspected Brett had only done the deal to get back at Tatiana Flint-Hamilton, but that was by the bye. A few nights ago she’d been tidying Logan’s room when she’d found four sheets of A4 paper stuffed under the bed, covered in practice signatures, all of them either Logan Baxter, Mrs Logan Baxter or Mrs Gabriel Baxter.
‘Should we be worried?’ Angela asked Brett. ‘She’s only ten, for God’s sake. Surely we should have a few more years before this starts?’
But Brett had been enchanted, insisting that they keep the papers and frame them. ‘It’s adorable. We should give them to her as a birthday present on her twenty-first.’
Brett would be coming home tonight, along with Jason, whose low moods were starting to worry Angela again. She’d hoped that the job up in London might have opened up some new friendships for him. The village was lovely, and Jason seemed to appreciate it, but there weren’t many opportunities for him to socialize with people his own age. Other than the pub, but Jase had never been the sort of confident man’s man who can strike up easy conversation in a room full of strangers. Unlike his sister, Jason seemed lonelier than ever since their move.
Grabbing a sun hat and a wicker shopping basket (she needed to stop at the greengrocer’s for some white cherries on the way home), Angela set off for the village, pushing her worries about Jason out of her mind for the time being. It was such a glorious day, with the dappled sunlight pouring through the trees and the heady scents of honeysuckle and mown grass hanging thick in the warm air. Turning right out of Furlings’ drive towards the green, she heard the church bells of St Hilda’s toll three times, and watched the front doors of the cottages open one by one as the other village mothers began their various school-runs. They reminded her of the little wooden people that used to come out of her father’s weathervane back home in Australia. There was a woman with an umbrella who popped out if it was raining and a male peasant in breeches and shirtsleeves if it was fine.
Life here can’t have changed much since Elizabethan times, she thought happily. It was odd to feel a connection to the past generations of Fittlescombe dwellers – essentially to dead people – but Angela found that she did, and that the idea of being one in a long line of people who had lived here and loved the place gave her a profound sense of belonging.
Relations with her living neighbours were a little more problematic. Thanks to Tatiana Flint-Hamilton’s negative PR campaign, a solid third of the village had taken against the Cranleys before they’d even arrived. Angela had done her best to reverse this, knocking on doors, mucking in at school events, making sure that everyone knew the door to Furlings was always open. But it wasn’t easy, not least because the antipathy wasn’t personal, but rooted in age-old traditions that Angela could barely understand, let alone change.
As Mrs Preedy at the shop put it, ‘It’s not about you, dear. I’m sure you’re lovely. It’s not about that Tatiana either. It’s about what’s right and proper and fair. Not having a Flint-Hamilton at Furlings would be like not having a river in the valley. Old Mr F-H should have consulted local feeling before he went out and changed things, all secretive like, behind people’s backs.’